Osma Bin Laden - Is he still alive ?

Bin Laden was born on March 10, 1957 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He was the seventeenth son of his deceased father, Muhammed Awad bin Laden. There are accounts that say Muhammed had up to fifty-four children, and he was married twenty-two times. His tenth wife, Hamida al-Attas was the mother of Osama. His father was a very successful businessman who had close ties with the Saudi royal family. Bin Laden was born into a very wealthy family. However, his parents were divorced soon after his birth, and his mother remarried. He grew up with his stepfather, mother, three half brothers, and one half sister.
Usama bin Laden was raised as a devout Sunni Muslim, and attended the Al-Thager Model School. It was often considered the best school in Saudi Arabia. For college, he attended King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. There he studied business administration and civil engineering. In 1979, he earned a degree in civil engineering, and only two years later, Bin Laden also received a degree in economics and public administration.
At the young age of seventeen, before he graduated college, bin Laden married his first wife Najwa Ghanem in 1974. In addition to Najwa, he married four other women and only divorced one. It has been reported that Bin Laden is a father to at lest twenty-four children. His first wife, Najwa had eleven of these children, including his first son, Abdallah in 1976.

Islamic Fundamentalism had a very eventful year in 1979, and Usama bin Laden has been at least indirectly connected to two out of the three events. The first incident occurred on January 16th when the Iranian Revolution began, and resulted in the first modern Muslim theocracy. The second was the Grand Mosque Seizure at Mecca on November 20th. This was a two week, blood spilt, hostage situation at the holiest site in Islam. The reason for this was a fundamentalist revolt against the Saudi government. Only two weeks earlier was the Iran hostage crisis. On November 4th, a large group of students stormed and captured the U.S. embassy. Two other U.S. embassies were also burned to the ground by Islamic mobs. The final major event that occurred this year was on December 25th when the Soviet Union attempted to suppress an Islamic Rebellion. The Soviet sent troops into Afghanistan to support men that had already been there.
In 1988, Osama bin Laden formed the al-Qaeda. He was formerly part of the Maktab al-Khadamat (MAK) organization put together to support the Afghan fighters against the Soviet Union and provide places for treatment and refugee. However, this was not enough for bin Laden. He wanted a more active military role and wanted Arab fighters to fight with the Afghan troops. In 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait and bin Laden offered his army of 12,000 Arab men to help defend Saudi Arabia; however the government denied his help. He grew angry and denounced his government’s dependency on the United States help and military. He wanted an end to all foreign military bases in his country.
After the Gulf War in the 1990’s the ceased-fire the agreement allowed the presence of long-term United States bases in Saudi Arabia and left Saddam Hussein as head of Iraq. The United States continued to undermine the Saudi Arabian rulers and this created hatred among Islamic militants and radicals. Bin Laden continued to speak against the government and the Saudi monarchy, so he was expelled in 1991 to Sudan. In Sudan, he led the National Islamic Front (NIF, and was assisted by donations from businesses and charitable organizations.

Osama bin Laden’s first two attacks on the United States occurred on Middle-Eastern soil. On December 29, 1992 he bombed the Gold Mihor Hotel in Aden, Yemen. This was where about one hundred United States soldiers were reported to be staying during Operation Restore Hope. Fortunately, for these men they had left two days earlier for Somalia. In 1996, he bombed Khobar, which was a military complex in Saudi Arabia. This bombing killed twenty-one U.S. soldiers. Al-Qaeda and Osama have also been linked to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya, Tanzania and Nairobi, and Dar es Salaam, the Madrid bombings, the Bali nightclub bombings, and the USS Cole bombing.
Perhaps the most devastating and famous attack by Bin Laden and al-Qaeda was the 2001 terrorist attack on U.S. soil. On September 11th over 2,968 people were killed. Two airplanes were hijacked and crashed into both of the World Trade Center towers in New York City causing them to collapse. A third plane was crashed into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia. The fourth hijacked plane, United Airlines 93, was apparently heading for the white house but was taken back by its passengers and crashed before it could strike another building.
The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) named bin Laden as the 465th person on the Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list on June 7, 1999. This was after he had been indicted for the U.S. embassy bombings in 1998. In direct response to the 2001 terrorist attack, he was also put on the top of the Twenty-Two Most Wanted Terrorist list on October 10, 2001. The U.S. Department of State began offering a $25 million reward for information leading up to the capture of conviction of bin Laden. Unlike popular belief, there was no reward put out for people to kill Osama bin Laden.